January 16, 2024

Nikolai Gates Vetr is president of the Wild Animal Initiative board. He graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where he majored in Ecology, Evolution, & Organismal Biology and Earth & Environmental Sciences. For his PhD, he attended the University of California, Davis, where he developed statistical models to explore the evolutionary relationships linking living and fossil species. Currently, he is a postdoc at Stanford University working in computational biology.

In this Q&A, which will appear in our 2023 annual report, Nik reflects on the state of the field, the progress we made last year, and what he hopes we’ll achieve in the future.

What are some of the biggest scientific challenges for the field of wild animal welfare?

To me, the fundamental unsolved questions of wild animal welfare science all revolve around causal inference and variation. If an animal, population, or ecosystem does something, what can we say about the effects that result? If society, nature, governments, or individuals intervene on some aspect of the natural world, what will happen at different timescales and levels of organization? If those interventions are carried out intentionally, how confident can we be that they will elicit the desired effects, and will they be self-sustaining or require continued monitoring and intervention? And if at coarse grain we successfully grapple with all these complex dynamical systems throughout the natural world, how is variation distributed at finer scales — what differences are there in the experiences of individuals within or between species?

In very broad terms, those are the central scientific questions I see wild animal welfare researchers facing. But they’re in good company, standing beside practitioners from related fields such as ecology and companion, laboratory, farmed, and zoo animal welfare science. Though researchers across these fields may differ in their exact focus, aims, or study systems, many of the challenges they face are one and the same.

What opportunities are available to make meaningful progress on these challenges?

Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) maintains a repository of open questions that reflect many of these limitations to present understanding. I personally see several promising opportunities for their resolution in combining low-cost telemetry with recent computer vision and other data-hungry computational methods known for performance at scale.

But broadly, the scope of these scientific challenges far exceeds the ability of any one organization to directly address. Instead, WAI can act as a multi-pronged force multiplier: incubating, incentivizing, and galvanizing wild animal welfare research through a combination of direct research, outreach, and regranting. Direct research output by WAI can serve as case studies on how to advance wild animal welfare science in both theoretical and applied contexts. But it can also bolster legitimacy and hone judgment in other affairs — even if the direct impact of maintaining an active research program is necessarily limited, indirect benefits abound. The tasks at hand will require decades of incremental progress, and WAI’s high-leverage contributions to advancing wild animal welfare science can have outsized effects on future success.

What about social or cultural challenges? And how is WAI uniquely positioned to make progress on them?

In my opinion, the biggest challenges involve public and scientific perceptions of the individual personhood and moral patienthood of most non-human animals. Getting people to care — or to recognize that they already do care — about the individual experiences of wild animals, absent compartmentalizing abstraction, seems the biggest barrier to developing a robust, publicly-supported funding environment and careful intervention strategy for wild animal welfare science. As the largest organization currently working in its field, WAI’s work to expand the discipline plays a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions of its legitimacy.

Another area where WAI might make strong positive contributions lies in not replicating the missteps of academic science. The WAI JEDI Committee works to identify practices in adjacent fields that not only hamper the acquisition and retention of talented researchers, but also negatively affect researchers’ lives and result in the natural selection of bad science. Work at the forefront of a nascent research area allows WAI to substitute messy, desultory growth with careful and judicious horticulture.

Which of WAI’s accomplishments in 2023 are you most proud of?

I’m most happy with the recent papers that have emerged from research funded through WAI’s Grants Program: Assessing Negative Welfare Measures for Wild Invertebrates and Can We Use the Study of Introspection to Assess Decision-Making and Understand Consciousness in Cephalopods?. Donors trusted WAI to fund neglected projects in animal welfare science, and formal publication of this research forms an important step in achieving field-building, force-multiplicative results. Wild animal welfare science is gaining momentum, increasing in size and scope while building a healthy foundation for the monumental tasks ahead!